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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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The late Civil
Rights activist and author Will D. Campbell, the only white man to participate
in Martin Luther King Jr.’s founding of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC), liked to tell about how white people, particularly
prosperous white people, reacted to his message of racial equality and
inclusiveness. In the late 1940s, when he was at Yale Divinity School, but
still interacting with the people in his home region of rural Mississippi, and
in the early 1950s, when he pastored a Baptist church in small-town Taylor,
Louisiana, Campbell’s white associates and parishioners found his attitudes
about race “endearing” and “charming.” They found it “cute” that Campbell cared
so much about “darkies.” By the mid-1950s and throughout the 1960s, however,
that patronizing but unthreatening reaction was replaced with one of menace. In
1956, Campbell was hounded out of his job as Director of Religious Life at the
University of Mississippi for the affront of playing interracial ping pong in
the student union. By the end of the 1950s, he was on the hit list of a
resurgent Ku Klux Klan and warned that if he ever set foot in Mississippi
again, he would not leave the state alive.

What
accounted for this change? How was it that white people could find Campbell’s
racial advocacy gently amusing in 1952 and a lynching offense only a few years
later? The answer is the Brown v. Board of Education decision handed down by the United States Supreme Court on May 17, 1954. This
landmark ruling reversed the legal premise, established by the court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, that racial segregation of public facilities was
legal as long as the facilities were equal. In Brown,
the court held that separate facilities were “inherently unequal.” Brown dealt with racially-segregated public schools in
Topeka, Kansas, but the ruling’s sweeping implications for the continuation of
American apartheid in its ubiquitous manifestations throughout the South were
obvious to everyone on either side of the issue. Segregation would not
disappear overnight, but it legally could no longer endure.

And
hence the violent change in white attitudes. In the 1940s and early 1950s,
segregation enjoyed established legal standing, and whites did not feel
threatened by a powerless integrationist like Will Campbell. But after the
decision in Brown, the forces in favor of racial
equality had the law on their side, and even formerly “moderate” whites were
infuriated. Will Campbell was just one target of the brutal mindset that
overtook those elements of society devoted to the principle of white racial
supremacy and privilege. Most of the victims of the violence that would rage
over the next two decades were black: from Emmett Till to Medgar Evers to
Martin Luther King Jr., but some were white too. Will Campbell managed to avoid
injury, but Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964 while
trying to register black Mississippi voters. Viola Liuzzo was murdered in 1965
while providing airport shuttle service to Selma voting rights marchers.
Journalist Nicholas von Hoffman captured the atmosphere that seized the South
after Brown. “There was a special molecule in the
air:” he wrote, “…fear. Everyone watched, and everyone was watched.”

Reflecting
on the divide that ripped time in two in the mid-1950s is the key to grasping,
in significant part, what Harper Lee was wrestling with in her two published
novels: the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird,
released in 1960, and Go Set a Watchman, written
before Mockingbird but not published until the summer
of 2015.

The
release of Go Set a Watchman, fifty-five years after
its companion novel, has been greeted by confusion and a cacophony of
denunciation and hostile suspicion. New York Times columnist Joe Nocera
decried Watchman’s publication as a “fraud” and sees
it as a move of crass commercialism by Rupert Murdock and his HarperCollins
Publishing Company. Certain mysteries do continue. Lee’s acclaim was so great
after To Kill a Mockingbird that her public clamored
for a follow-up book, but she refused to deliver it and long denied that she
ever would, despite having Go Set a Watchman in her
desk drawer. Lee is now eighty-nine and residing in assisted living after
suffering a stroke. As a result of her age and physical condition, many have
questioned whether she made the decision to publish Watchman willingly or under duress from her aggressive attorney, Tonja Carter, who has
given conflicting statements since coming forth with the manuscript she claims,
variously, to have discovered in 2011 or 2014. Close friends, however, like
fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Diane McWhorter, defend Lee’s soundness of mind
and assert her approval of the recent decision to publish Watchman at long last.

Adding
to the brouhaha over the publication of Go Set a Watchman is the startling discovery that Atticus Finch, almost a sainted figure in the
1930s setting of To Kill a Mockingbird, is depicted
in the 1950s setting of Watchman as an unapologetic
bigot, a one-time member of the Ku Klux Klan, and the current chairman of his
town’s White Citizens’ Council, an ugly, fiercely racist, segregationist
organization that has justly been typified as the Klan without the robes. The
prepublication revelation that the Atticus we meet in the current book is not
the Atticus we have loved for over a half century has led many fans of To Kill a Mockingbird to announce that they won’t read the
new release. But figures close to the author, including Diane McWhorter, have
commented that the book released this summer may contain the statements on race
that Harper Lee wanted to make all along.

Whether
or not Lee will ever comment on her long reluctance to bring Watchman into print remains to be seen (I doubt she will).
Nonetheless, we know that Watchman was the first of
the two books completed and was submitted for publication to editor Tay Hohoff
at J. P. Lippincott in 1957. Hohoff did not reject the book out of hand,
but neither did she accept it. Instead, obviously interested in the story’s
narrative materials, Hohoff asked Lee to engage in a radical rewrite. Watchman is set in the 1950s and is told in the third
person from the point of view of Jean Louise Finch, a twenty-six-year-old woman
living in New York who has returned to her tiny Maycomb, Alabama, hometown to
spend her vacation with her seventy-two-year-old lawyer father Atticus. The
novel details how the adult daughter comes to realize and confront some
distressing qualities about a father she always has idolized. The closeness of
the parent/child relationship is established in flashbacks to when Jean Louise,
nicknamed Scout, is a child in the 1930s. Hohoff challenged Lee to set the
entire novel in Scout’s childhood, and the author labored over that project for
two years, in the end producing To Kill a Mockingbird,
which emerged as an entirely different book. Whatever its merits and failures, Go Set a Watchman cannot be appropriately characterized as To Kill a Mockingbird’s first draft.

For
those who haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird, or
haven’t read it in a long while, the novel is narrated by the schoolchild Scout
Finch from ages six to nine, circa 1933–1935. (The Oscar-winning 1962 movie
directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Gregory Peck is so largely faithful to
the novel that the film’s slight variations here and there don’t really warrant
analysis or require specific comment.) Much of the story endeavors to depict
life for a small-town Southern girl in the midst of the Great Depression. She
goes to school, but she hates it. She goes to church faithfully, but without a
lot of enthusiasm. And she plays with her friends, mostly her older brother
Jem, and during summer vacations with Dill Harris, a boy who regularly visits
his aunt who lives next door to the Finches. The central event that we have
long most vividly associated with Mockingbird,
Atticus’s defense of the black laborer Tom Robinson for the alleged rape of a
white woman named Mayella Ewell, is not introduced until page eighty-three of
my 309-page paperback.

From
the beginning, Scout is close to her widowed father. Every night she curls up
in his lap and he reads to her, in the process teaching her to read before she
starts school. Scout loves Atticus, but at the novel’s outset she doesn’t
regard him as a remarkable figure. She sees him as old and physically weak.
That attitude changes radically across the years, first when Atticus reveals
that he is a crack marksman willing to place himself in harm’s way to shoot
down a rabid dog, and subsequently in a series of events arising out of Tom
Robinson’s arrest and trial. Before court is convened, Atticus faces down a
lynch mob (with Scout’s spunky assistance). And in the courtroom, Atticus
proves himself a master legal tactician, proving Tom’s innocence beyond any
conceivable doubt. Tom is nonetheless convicted by an all-white, all-male jury,
as Atticus has warned his children will happen. But in standing up to the
forces of prejudice, Atticus reveals himself a titan of human rectitude and
decency. And when, at the trial’s end, all the black people in the courtroom
balcony rise to honor his exit, the novel delivers its emotional roundhouse:
“Stand up,” the genial black Reverend Sykes tells Scout. “Your father’s
passing.”

Very
much of what To Kill a Mockingbird wants to impart
emerges from lessons Atticus teaches to his children. He banishes the word
“nigger” from his children’s vocabulary and accepts the accusation that he’s a
“nigger lover,” because, “I do my best to love everybody.” He states his
defense of Tom as a matter of conscience, and explains, “I couldn’t go to
church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.” He counsels Scout and
Jem that “You never really understand a person until you consider things from
his point of view.”

But
though the book achieves this portrait, its core purpose is not the
beatification of Atticus Finch. Rather, it seeks to paint a picture of Southern
life in the Great Depression in all its complexity. It gives careful attention
to two types of impoverished white people as represented by the proud,
unstinting Cunninghams and the conniving, violent Ewells: Mayella who falsely
accuses Tom, and her vile father Bob who has raped his own daughter and testifies
against an innocent man for that crime.

Also,
with very deft strokes, the author depicts black life at the time. Scout and
Jem’s de facto mother is Calpurnia, a loving, strict, and wise caregiver.
Calpurnia has enough education to guide Scout in speaking with proper grammar
and pronunciation, but she earns her living as a cook and housekeeper. The
black church in which Calpurnia worships is too poor to afford hymnals (which
many of its parishioners would not be able to read), and so the music director
has to speak the lyrics before the congregation sings them. And with tellingly
incisive accuracy and profound impact, Lee establishes what it was like to be a
black man in the 1930s South. At trial when Atticus asks Tom why he ran away
from Bob Ewell, Tom explains, “If you was a nigger like me, you’d be scared
too.” In the end, Tom seals his doom before the jury when he admits that he
knew Mayella was being abused by her father and he helped her occasionally
because he felt sorry for her. What unforgivably uppity effrontery! A black man
who would dare feel sorry for a white woman. To make sure that we see the
extent of the indictment of the Ewells and the ills they perpetrate on their
neighbors, Lee pointedly associates them with the abiding emblem of the whitewashed
South. Bob Ewell’s full name is Robert E. Lee Ewell.

Though
the two novels do not overlap narratively, they do share a number of elements
in addition to characters and themes. When Lee was creating Mockingbird,
she even cannibalized certain language word for word from Watchman,
including an introductory passage about Scout’s Aunt Alexandra and a
description of Maycomb. Scout’s feistiness as a child is rendered similarly in
both books, although in different scenes, and the amused pleasure Atticus finds
in his daughter appears in the texts of both. Similarly, Aunt Alexandra’s
high-handed superiority is depicted in both books. Each contains a scene of
socializing women taking tea and holding forth on issues of the day. In Mockingbird, the occasion is a meeting of the Women’s
Missionary Society, where the self-righteous ladies celebrate
culture-destroying Christian proselytizers as benevolent agents bringing “help”
to black Africans, all the while sneering at the people of color who labor in their
own houses. In Watchman, the adult Jean Louise joins
Alexandra at a gathering of comparably-minded women, some of whom are Scout’s
own former high school classmates. The women sip their drinks and express such
vicious desires as that for the entertainment of a “good nigger trial.” One
woman ridicules her maid for a simple instance of misunderstanding, taking the
occasion to disparage her employee’s lack of intelligence. When the
conversation turns to recent actions by the NAACP, one woman explains that “The
niggers up north who are running things are trying to do it like Gandhi did it.
And you know what that is? Communism.” Of course, these were the years in which
US Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have a list of 205 known Communists working
in the State Department.

One
conclusion with which I suspect all who read both of these books will agree is
that To Kill a Mockingbird is by far the better
crafted book. Lee’s control of point of view in the 1960 volume is a prime
example. Watchman, in contrast, is far messier in its
point of view. Mostly, the narrative employs third person, limited to Scout’s
point of view. But not always. Sometimes it wanders into first and even second
person. Sometimes, if only briefly, it slides into another character’s point of
view. And some scenes tell us, clumsily, explicitly, what Scout cannot see and
cannot know. Another example concerns material selection and inclusion. To Kill a Mockingbird ends when Scout is still a child. But
if the story had demanded that Scout be followed into her early teens, I doubt
Lee would have included scenes we get in Go Set a Watchman that concern Scout’s first menstruation, her disastrous decision to stuff her
adolescent bra with falsies, and her unconvincing ignorance about pregnancy.
These are pretty standard ­coming-of-age scenes and appear repeatedly in
various renditions in teen-oriented movies, but they are not relevant to the
through story of Jean Louise’s having her eyes opened to her revered father’s
true nature.

Of
course, I hasten to observe that some of the complaints, like those above, that
I have about Go Set a Watchman might have been
addressed had Lee’s current literary team not decided to publish the book
without a fresh edit. This book has the novelty of being the book that Tay
Hohoff turned down, but Hohoff’s long-ago rejection alone should have suggested
a skilled editorial hand on the book as something to be published. Mockingbird was edited; Watchman should have been too. That would have helped with clunky dialogue, which never
appears in Mockingbird. It would have eliminated an
entire chapter mysteriously devoted to the choice of hymns at the Maycomb
Methodist Church. And a firm edit would have insisted on some clarity that the
current version needlessly lacks. We do not, for instance, know precisely when
we are. Atticus and Scout discuss an important Supreme Court case that has
altered (Atticus would say gravely damaged) race relations throughout the
South. This case would almost certainly have to be Brown vs.
Board of Education, and that would place Jean Louise’s vacation at home
some time during or after the summer of 1954. Such dating would at least
account for Atticus’s being the chairman of a Citizens’ Council that wasn’t
founded until July of 1954, after the Brown ruling
in May. But the case is never named. And those readers with a memory of Scout’s
being nine years old in 1935 and noting that she is twenty-six in Watchman will place the action in 1952, two aggravating
years before Brown was adjudicated. An editor with
even limited discretion could just have made Watchman’s
Jean Louise twenty-eight or twenty-nine.

Moreover,
a sympathetic edit could have addressed the persistence here of other nettling
inconsistencies between the two texts. Many concern the trial of Tom Robinson,
which is minor enough in Watchman that its mention
could almost be eliminated. Tom is referred to Atticus by Judge Taylor in Mockingbird, but by the maid Calpurnia in Watchman. And Tom is found guilty in Mockingbird but acquitted in Watchman. And at least one
“uncorrected” discrepancy seems distressingly unwise. In Mockingbird,
Tom is accused of raping a grown woman, and he is entirely innocent, though
found guilty. In Watchman, Tom is accused of raping a
fourteen-year-old girl, and he is found not guilty because Atticus is able to
prove (and this seems highly unlikely to me) that the sex was consensual. As
the text itself points out, had Tom been charged with statutory rape, he would
have been found guilty. The best we can say about these details in Watchman is that they give us insight into the degree to
which Lee rethought matters as she wrote To Kill a
Mockingbird.

But
my editorial concerns aside, I want to emphasize that I think Diane McWhorter
is correct to suspect that the overall consideration of issues in Go Set a Watchman may have been more relevant to the world
of 1960 than those in Mockingbird. In addition, I
think those issues remain more pertinent to the world of 2015. I don’t think we
can settle any debate about whether the wise, philosophical Atticus of 1935
could have evolved into the ugly racist of the mid-1950s. (Interestingly,
Harper Lee biographer Charles J. Shields has argued that her father Amasa
Coleman Lee made the journey in the opposite direction, from moderate segregationist
in the 1930s to pro-integration by the time Mockingbird was released.) But there were, sadly and certainly, a lot more small-town
Southern white lawyers like the Atticus of the 1950s than there were
self-branded “nigger lover” white lawyers in the 1930s South. In short, the
gentle Atticus of Mockingbird is an inspirational
ideal; the angry Atticus of Watchman is a portrait of
the real white men who ruled the South through the 1950s and beyond.

It
is wonderful to want to believe that there were benevolent white figures in the
South of 1935 when, in addition to the injustice they met before all-white
juries, eighteen black men were murdered by lynch mobs. Certainly not all
whites were monsters; not all approved of the lynchman’s noose. My maternal
grandfather, who was nearly forty in 1935, was not a man who would have
condoned violence, and in his own way, he treated his black Louisiana neighbors
and customers (he owned a jewelry store) with a modicum of decency. But he was
an out-and-out bigot and a fierce defender of white supremacy and racial
segregation throughout his entire life. My grandfather seems a far more
accurate example of a “benevolent” white Southerner of the era than such
paternalistic liberals as Atticus, Sheriff Tate, and Judge Taylor, as depicted
and saluted in To Kill a Mockingbird. About the last
of these, one must note that Judge Taylor does not exhibit the courage that the
real Alabama Judge James Edwin Horton showed in 1934 when he set aside a guilty
verdict and death penalty by an all-white jury in the infamous rape case
against the Scottsboro Boys. I have always wondered if Horton was Harper Lee’s
model, not for Judge Taylor, but for the Atticus of To Kill
a Mockingbird.

In
short, Go Set a Watchman is a truer portrait of Southern
intransigence on race than is Mockingbird. Watchman uses Jean Louise’s long simmering romance with a
former schoolmate, Henry Clinton, who is now Atticus’s young law partner, as an
apt metaphor for the position in which Jean Louise finds herself in her
twenties. Henry has worked hard, and he has pulled himself up out of poverty.
Jean Louise admires and cares for him. Henry is tied to Maycomb. He wants to
marry Jean Louise, and he wants her to make a life with him where the two of
them grew up. But for Jean Louise to choose Henry, to choose again her Southern
hometown, is to turn a blind eye to the cruel attitudes all her loved ones hold
and continue to hold so fiercely. For just as she discovers with her father,
she learns that Henry holds reprehensible views. It is Henry who reveals that
Atticus once joined the Ku Klux Klan, explaining, “A long time ago, the Klan
was respectable, like the Masons. Almost every man of any promise was a
member.” Balderdash, of course. The very raison d’être of the Klan was to intimidate black people through the threat of violence. Jean
Louise summarizes her frustration at being both attracted to and repelled by
her home, as represented by Henry, when she complains sarcastically to Atticus
for not raising her as a “nice dim-witted Southern lady, a mealy-mouthed
magnolia type, who bats her eyelashes and lives for nothing but her lil’ ole
husband.”

Discouragingly,
Jean Louise’s entire family, her Uncle Jack and her Aunt Alexandra, in addition
to Atticus, are arrogant racists and inflexible segregationists. They see their
rights and deserved privileges in the aftermath of the decision in the unnamed Brown case as being torn away from them by undeserving,
ungrateful, and ignorant black people. Alexandra complains that the black
citizens of Maycomb possess “a veneer of civilization so thin that a bunch of
uppity Yankee Negroes can shatter a hundred years of progress.” One can only
imagine the puzzled question on the lips of her black neighbors: “What hundred
years of progress?” Jack defends the South’s starting the Civil War as a people
just trying to protect their identity as separate from that of the North. This
is clumsy code for defending the institution of slavery by calling it a “way of
life.” Certain Southern loyalists to this day deny that the Civil War even
involved a fight over slavery. Jack claims merely to believe in small
government (an argument still raging in our own time), but he is a doctor so
rich that he retired before middle age, so when he engages in a long rant about
Social Security, we tend to notice the complaint line that the law gives the
have-nots “more than their due,” while “the haves are restricted from getting
more.” Another episode that echoes into our time.

But Watchman’s Atticus is the real bigot, and how he
evolved from the father in Mockingbird who believed
in “equal rights for all; special privileges for none” the text of the current
novel does not explore. But by the mid-1950s, Atticus chides Jean Louise’s
idealism by sneering, “Have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of
backward people living among people advanced in... civilization? You realize
that our Negro population is backward, don’t you? You realize that the vast
majority of them here in the South are unable to share fully in the
responsibilities of citizenship?” Atticus sees his town and region as standing
on the doorstep of doom. Black people cannot be allowed to vote because “When
they vote, they vote in blocs,” and thus the day was coming when you’d have
“Negroes in every office.” Black people cannot be allowed equal rights because
then, Atticus taunts his daughter, the South would have “Negroes by the carloads
in our schools and churches and theaters.”

Atticus
is so obsessed by the specter of apocalypse in racial equality that he stoops
to defending the corrupt political operation of his own beloved hometown.
Maycomb, the novel tells us early on, is run by a typical Southern Big Man, a
fixer with the power of a mob godfather. Maycomb’s ruler is William Willoughby,
and he controls everyone’s vote and every public office in the county. Nothing
happens in Maycomb without William Willoughby’s permission. But in denouncing
the prospect of black people at the ballot box Atticus says, “Willoughby’s a
crook, we know that, but do you know of any Negro who knows as much as
Willoughby? The Negroes are still in their childhood as a people.”

Jean
Louise is horrified by all that Atticus reveals to her. She argues back with
him, speaking, presumably, of her childhood, “You neglected to tell me that we
were naturally better than the Negroes, that they were able to go so far but so
far only.” She reminds her father of his more appealing habits: “I’ve never in
my life seen you give that insolent, back-of-the-hand treatment half the white
people down here give Negroes just when they’re talking to them.” And she
chides him in anguish in the middle of his fury over abridged states’ rights
and his racist rant about black inferiority and their lack of ability to
embrace the mantel of full citizenship: “Has anybody, in all the wrangling and
high words about what kind of government we should have, thought about helping
the Negroes?”

But
Atticus will surrender no ground, and Jean Louise finally attacks him: “You’re
a coward,” she says, “as well as a snob and a tyrant.” A while later, in the
same vein, she says, “I’ll never believe a word you say to me again. I despise
you and everything you stand for.” Important as this rejection of her father’s
disgusting ideas is, as elsewhere in Go Set a Watchman (yet again my yearning for the assistance of a sympathetic editor), I found the
exchange too bald, too “on the nose” as we say in creative writing classes, and
therefore not quite believable. Jean Louise has spent a lifetime loving and
admiring her father. She is furious with him. Her whole idea of him has been
seriously undermined. But she doesn’t despise him, and her acidly saying so in such
a direct fashion inadequately captures the certain anguish her character must
feel. Nonetheless, and in counterpoint, the surprising rapprochement the novel
executes in its final pages seems unearned and not a little disconcerting.

I
should register some other concerns as well. When Atticus and Jean Louise
discuss the unnamed Supreme Court decision that seems central to everyone
involved, Jean Louise attacks it for violating the Tenth Amendment, that last
of our Bill of Rights that reserves unspecified powers not granted to the
federal government “to the States respectively or to the people.” She argues,
in sum, that she approves of the decision, presumably to end legal segregation,
but doesn’t think the Supreme Court should have been the body to do it. I am
sure people made just this argument. I don’t believe that one of them was Jean
Louise Finch. Elsewhere in discussion with Atticus, Jean Louise seems to give
credence to the idea that the activists of the NAACP were just a bunch of
troublemakers who were, to invoke a popular premise of the time, just “stirring
up” otherwise content Southern black people. The novel itself can be read to
agree, and that is a problem from this vantage point for sure. Had the brave
soldiers of the NAACP, Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC, the Congress of Racial
Equality, and other civil rights organizations not kept pushing for the rights
enunciated in Brown, those rights might not yet have
come to exist in the daily life of our nation.

As
any of us who follow the news is well aware, we remain in 2015 a
racially-divided nation. Black men occupy our prisons in far greater numbers
than their proportion in the population. The shooting of unarmed black people
by white law officers is an outrage we can’t seem to end. How tragic that Tom
Robinson’s words about the fear he feels because of the color of his skin still
speak so clearly to the condition people of color often characterize as
“driving while black.” Meanwhile, the recent murder of black people in their
Charleston, South Carolina, house of worship, an atrocity so common in the era
of Go Set a Watchman, is emblematic of a disease of
heart and mind that is not yet cured. We can point to positive developments, of
course. I was born before Brown vs. Board of Education,
before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery bus, before
black people could dine in most restaurants in the South or use the “white”
restroom or water fountain in any public building, before the Voting Rights Act
of 1965 finally enforced citizenship rights for black people granted in the
Fourteenth Amendment and denied for a century thereafter, before the election
of a black man as our nation’s president. And I have lived to see Atticus’s
fear that black people would vote only on the basis of color proven wrong, for
I live in New Orleans, a black majority city that has twice in a row elected a
white mayor.

But
as a democratic people, we remain a work in progress, and the elections of
President Obama and Mayor Mitch Landrieu in New Orleans do not mean the battle
for equal justice is won or that racial tensions have ceased to exist. And in
this regard, as contrasted with To Kill a Mockingbird,
the world depicted in Go Set a Watchman is a better
reflection of the distance we have yet to travel.

Fredrick Barton is Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of
the volume of essays Rowing to Sweden and the novels The El Cholo
Feeling Passes, Courting Pandemonium, Black and White on the
Rocks and A House Divided. His most recent novel, In the Wake of
the Flagship, is a black comedy about an unlikely college president trying
to save his beleaguered institution in the aftermath of a devastating
hurricane.